#cray supercomputer

[humanoidhistory]

Cray supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, circa 1984.

[weirdlandtv]

Stills from the 1985 Mick Jagger music video, Hard Woman. The animation was done with a Cray supercomputer: very state of the art at the time.

I remember when the video came out; it really impressed me. Towards the end, the computerized Mick jumps out of a window to go after the girl, and for some reason that particular bit stayed with me. It’s always the first image that pops into my head when I’m thinking of this video.

The song wasn’t a big hit I believe, but I’ve always really liked it. This video version, a re-recording with The Hooters, differs from the album take: it’s rockier, has a more unusual structure.

[planetearthtradefederation]

CRAY SUPERCOMPUTER

MEMRISTORS

POSITRONIC NET POSITRONIC BRAIN

[quondam]

This video shows the installation of the Cray Y-MP, a computer four times faster than any other computer at Ames. Computer room scenes, aeronautical and space applications, and other non-aerospace applications are also included. No sound.

[quondam]

[thebrownpaperbag]

THAT SHIT CRAY!!!!

I'm probably ODing...

[newstfionline]

The iPad in Your Hand: As Fast as a Supercomputer of Yore

By John Markoff, NY Times, May 9, 2011 Jack DongarraIt's common wisdom that the computer you can hold in the palm of your hand today is as powerful as a computer from years ago that filled an entire room.

But now Jack Dongarra, one of the computer scientists who keeps track of the world's 500 fastest computers, has figured out just how fast that computer in your palm really is.

Dr. Dongarra, who is on the computer science faculty at the University of Tennessee and a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of the keepers of the Linpack computing benchmark, a linear algebra test that measures the mathematical capabilities of computers.

His research group has run the test on Apple's new iPad 2, and it turns out that the legal-pad-size tablet would be a rival for a four-processor version of the Cray 2 supercomputer, which, with eight processors, was the world's fastest computer in 1985.

Dr. Dongarra's researchers also discovered that the new iPad2 is about 10 times as fast as its predecessor, the original iPad. That is likely because of some design changes in the microprocessor used in the new version of the Apple tablet.

To date, the researchers have run the test on only one of the iPad microprocessor's two processing cores. When they finish their project, though, Dr. Dongarra estimates that the iPad 2 will have a Linpack benchmark of between 1.5 and 1.65 gigaflops (billions of floating-point, or mathematical, operations per second). That would have insured that the iPad 2 could have stayed on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers through 1994.

The Cray 2 was an unusual computer even by the standards of its designer, Seymour Cray. About the size of a large washing machine, it was cooled by immersion in a liquid called Flourinert that had been developed by 3M, and that was occasionally used as a human blood substitute during surgery.

The machine was housed in an aquariumlike structure, and was affectionately nicknamed "bubbles."

Meanwhile, the fact that the iPad runs off a battery and is air-cooled has given Dr. Dongarra some ideas, like building a supercomputer composed of a couple of stacks of the tablets.